DSC-BRAIN USER GUIDE · START HERE
Reading the dashboard honestly
What grey, HELD, dashed, amber and blue mean, and why the dashboard would rather show nothing than guess.
● verified for 9.0.0 · firmware train 8.2.0.0
● last verified 2026-09-17 · mirrored 2026-09-15
Read this first
The rule behind every screen: never fake liveness. A value is shown only when the kit has a real reading for it. Everything else is labelled, not smoothed over.
State cues you will see
| Cue | Means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Grey tile / grey text | No data. The device is out of service, dark, or has never reported. | Check Kit › Inventory for the device's In service and online state. |
| HELD chip | The reading is frozen at its last good value because the source went quiet. | Hover for the age. If it persists, see Troubleshooting › Readings held or stale. |
| Dashed line or dashed path | A nameplate guess (fan % × rating) rather than a learned value, or an INVENTED feature. | Run Kit › Learning to replace nameplate airflow with measured CFM. |
| Amber pulse on an equipment tile | The appliance is near its arming threshold. | Nothing. It tells you a switch is about to happen. |
| Blue glow on an equipment tile | The appliance is in its minimum off-time cooldown. | Wait. The ladder will not ask it again until the timer clears. |
| HUB LINK DOWN | The brain cannot reach the hub. The hub keeps running its ladder on its own. | Troubleshooting › Hub offline. |
| Up / Down / HS / HB # chips | Up is hub uptime while the link is healthy; HS is handshake age; HB # is the heartbeat tick count, not hours. | Never trust an Up chip next to HUB LINK DOWN. |
| RECONNECT OVERRIDE / PENDING RE-ASSERT | A hub reconnect happened while manual takeover was on. See Glossary. | Turn takeover off when you are done; the brain re-asserts Want. |
| CANOPY UNBOUND | No sensor is placed at the canopy, so canopy readings are absent. | Settings › Devices › Zigbee: open a temperature/humidity sensor and set Zone (the tent) → Placement Canopy → Save. |
| LAMP ON · ROLE NOT ENFORCED | A lamp plug is on but no task is following the photoperiod for it. | Bind the plug with the Lamp plug task if you want the hub's clock to drive it. |
| saving… → saved on hub | A write went to the hub and the hub confirmed it. | If instead you see not applied — still X (reason), the hub refused or clamped it; the reason tells you why. |
| Simulated room banner | Demo mode: nothing here is real hardware. | Expected on the public demo. On a kit it means the brain was started with demo mode on. |
Things that look wrong but are not
- Grey RF on a device is not always a fault. Out-of-service inventory stays quiet on purpose.
- A frozen hub uptime across a brain restart is the estimate carrying between polls, not a boot loop.
- Black camera frames are not proof of a dark tent. The 4×8 lamp is not visible to the hub, so the kit cannot cross-check it.
- Expected stage on a plant card is a calendar expectation from sprout and flip dates, not a measurement.
Seeing where a number comes from
Settings › System › Developer has three switches for this:
- Show entity ids prints the underlying entity name next to values.
- Provenance mode labels each value as raw, computed or catalog.
- Show INVENTED rows reveals settings rows for features the rig cannot do yet.
The entity inspector (click any value that offers it) shows the raw state, its age and its history for that entity.
DSC-Brain user guide · Reading the dashboard honestly · this page is edited on the site; the Notion original was retired after the mirror